Gene Wolfe - Pirate Freedom

The other soldier might have been bad news if he had stuck me with his bayonet, but he tried to cock the hammer, and I kicked him in the knee and shoved him over, too.

After that I yelled to the men outside to rush the fort and I would open the gate.

I never did, but before I get to that I ought to say something about those spike bayonets the soldiers had. We could have used them, and a few of us did. The main advantages they gave were more reach and a thrust like with a boarding pike. When we camped on shore, they made good candleholders, too. You just stuck them in the ground and put your candle in the socket.

Only they had two big disadvantages. The main one was that even if you killed somebody with one he did not die right away. You could put one into somebody's chest, and sure, he was going to die. But he was going to a minute or ten from now, and not now. He would have time enough to stab you back, or cock a pistol and shoot.

Like I said, I never did open the big gate. It was Capt. Burt who did that. Three people falling off the wall got everybody's attention, and he just went over and took down the bar. He did not let things like that rattle him, and it was one of the qualities that made him such a good leader.

That night, just about everyone was for going after the gold. I could not believe it. I liked money as well as anyone-or I thought I did. But going after the mules and the soldiers who were guarding them? A couple of hundred soldiers minimum? When they would have at least a full day's head start?

I thought it was crazy, and I said so.

When the vote was finally taken, my side got maybe two hundred out of the whole eight hundred or so. One of the votes we got was Capt. Burt's, because my side had been his side, too. I am still proud of that. The sensible men voted with us, but there were not enough of us.

At first the thinking had been that the mule train with the gold would head back to Panama. Our Kuna said that it had not. It had taken the road southeast into the San Blas Mountains, probably making for Santa Maria, a little town on the Pacific side of Darien. I never got to talk to anybody who had been with that mule train, but my guess is they thought we would head to Panama, and going east would throw us off.

Nearly everybody wanted to follow the gold. We could march faster than loaded mules, they said, and would catch up to it. If we did not, we would take the town and catch them there. The men who had marched up behind Portobello would stay on the ships this time, and those who had stayed on the ships would march. Only all the captains would march again, just like before. The Kuna had agreed to guide us again. They had never beaten the Spanish before, and they were on cloud nine.

I would have chained Novia up again. Or I think now that I would have or I might have. I never got the chance. She just disappeared. I left Bouton in command of the Sabina, telling him that he was to take orders from Novia if she came back to the ship. I knew she would not, but that is what I said. He was going to move some guns to heel the ship over and lift the leak out of the water, then patch it properly.

I am not going to write about the march to Santa Maria. I could not make it sound as bad as it really was. I had thought the march to Portobello had been bad, and that Portobello itself had been bad, which it was. The march to Santa Maria was ten times worse. There were a hundred times when I simply could not believe that the Spanish were stupid enough, and tough enough, to ship gold across Darien to Portobello. Then we would find fresh droppings from the mules, which proved that we were on the right track. The only thing I know about mule droppings is that they are dirty and stink, but people who knew more (or said they did) said they showed that we were only a day and a half behind the mule train.

About the time we hit the big lake and had to go around it, it got to be a day. A map I saw when I was still at Saint Teresa's said that was Lake Bayana.

It was very, very bad. The Spanish must have had mules loaded with water as well as gold. We did not. There was water everywhere, but it made anyone who drank it sick. We tried to boil it, but everything that might have burned if it had been dry was wet. Rain was the only thing that saved us, and the rain made us as miserable as any Spaniard could ask for. When it rained, we caught the water any way we could, including wringing out our clothes into our mouths. It would rain all day and all night, and the whole country would flood a foot deep. Then it would stop, leaving everything dripping with humidity. It was like a steam bath. Sweat poured from us. Everything was wet, and nothing was drinkable. We greased ourselves to keep from being bitten by the mosquitoes, and sweated the grease off. We got leeches on our legs, not just once but again and again and again.

It is a mortal sin to take your own life. I know that, and it was one of the things the monks pounded home to us-do not kill yourself so that your soul can be with God. It will not. You are not free to reject His gift of life.

But I think I would have killed myself if Novia had not been there. She had hidden among the Kuna, as I ought to have guessed. Pinkie brought her to me when we had been marching for almost a week, saying that Novia was my wife, too. I did not bother to explain that we were not married. I just said that I did not have two wives. Novia was my wife and Pinkie was not-not that I did not like her. (The last thing I needed was an enemy among the Native Americans.) I did like her, she was a wonderful woman and very beautiful and smart. Only not my wife.

Pinkie would not hear of it. She was my wife. Novia was my wife. The other woman was my wife, too.

Novia and I just stared at each other. What other woman?

It was Azuka. I am sure it was funny, but none of us could laugh. We could only hold each other and try to bring each other some comfort. Willy was dead. Jarden had tried to kill Azuka, and she had run away from him. It took me a long time to get the whole story, and I never did get all of it. Willy had drowned crossing some little river. Jarden had tried to kill her because she would not stop crying for Willy. I told her I understood, she could cry all she wanted, and if Jarden or anybody else tried to kill her I would stop it quick. Novia said the same thing.

(That was when I found out that the best way in the world to make yourself feel better when you have hit bottom is to try to get somebody else to feel better. There are certain things in life that are truly worth knowing, and that is one of the big ones.)

So Azuka had run away, and I was the only person she could think of who might protect her. She had started asking about me, where was I, when she stopped running. It had made Pinkie think she was another wife.

For the next week or so, I kept telling Novia that she should have let me know she was along sooner. And she kept saying that she had been afraid I might really kill her. I think the thing she was really afraid of was that I would have wanted to take her back, and there would have been a big fight with Capt. Burt.

That is all I am going to say about the march, except that people kept getting sick, day after day after day. Later, Capt. Burt told me there was one day when we lost twenty men.

Anyone would think we would not have had the strength left to attack Santa Maria when we got there, but we did. There were houses to keep off the rain, cisterns full of good water, food, and a navigable river. A Spanish army could have killed us all before an hour was out, but we would have gone for its throat like mad dogs. Which was pretty much what we were by then.

The really crazy thing was that there was hardly anyone in the town to fight. The Spanish settlers just gave up, and there were only about a dozen soldiers. We took the whole town just by saying we had taken it.